Tribute to Houston

In solidarity wth Hurricane Harvey flood victims, I wrote a poem that I hope will touch people who have never known what it’s like to literally go underwater. Thank you to Poets Reading the News, for posting my poem called City Turned to Inland Lake, on their front page.

While Hurricane Harvey made landfall last Friday, the real news didn’t happen until a few days later when the flood waters began to rise. Even though it was sunny and seventy-five degrees where I was, I knew exactly what Houston inhabitants were going through, because I only moved out of one of those flooded Houston neighborhoods two years ago. As I watched in horror the news reports and friends’ posts on Facebook, I re-lived the floods of years past where friends had lost everything and I pitched in as best I could to help in the cleanup. Now friends were going through it again, but this time with thousands and thousands of others all at the same time, on an unprecedented scale.

There is also an underlying subtext alluding to my struggle with autoimmune disease and adrenal fatigue that I struggled through while trying to take care of my very young children, during the time that I lived in Houston. I often felt at the time that I was (metaphorically) going underwater.